Christmas Stocking Coloring Pages

Stocking templates to decorate and cut out

The decorate-your-own page is one large, completely plain stocking with a strip of little pictures down the side — a star, a snowflake, a candy cane, holly, a gingerbread man, a bell, a heart and a tree — to copy onto it or to invent something else entirely. The second template has six blank stockings with a dashed line around each and a pair of scissors in the corner. Colour them, write a name across the cuff, cut them out and hang them on the tree, string them into a garland or tuck one into a card.

Hanging the stockings

Several pages are about the tradition itself. A family’s stockings hang along the banister with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk left out below — one of them with a paw print for the dog. Two children sleep in bunk beds with an empty stocking hooked on each end post. A grandmother knits a new one in her armchair while the cat sleeps on the yarn, and on Christmas morning a boy pulls a toy train out of a stocking so full it spills across the rug.

The lettering page borrows its words from the 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, in which “the stockings were hung by the chimney with care” — it reads HUNG WITH CARE in big bubble letters under a garland of five little stockings.

Patterns for older colourists

The detailed pages are built for pencils and patience. The Nordic stocking is knitted in bands of eight-pointed stars, walking reindeer, diamonds, pine trees and snowflakes, with a checked heel and toe. The zentangle stocking is divided into flowing bands of scales, spirals, flowers and basket weave. The mandala has stockings radiating like petals from a central star, the doodle page packs a dozen stockings together with candy canes and holly in every gap, and the Victorian mantelpiece has three embroidered stockings under a carriage clock, candlesticks and a pine garland.

A set for the whole family

The five easy pages have thick outlines and big open shapes for a fat crayon. The nine middle pages — the templates, the family stockings, grandma knitting, the bunk beds, Christmas morning, the woodland animals, the garland and the patchwork stocking — will hold a school-age child for half an hour. The six detailed pages will take an adult most of an evening.

Print the whole set at once

The button at the top of this page bundles all twenty into a single download, so you can print the lot for a class or a rainy December afternoon rather than picking through them one at a time. Every page comes as a PDF in both US Letter and A4.

What to colour them with

The easy pages and the templates take crayon and marker well. The Nordic stocking, the zentangle stocking and the mandala are better with coloured pencils or a fine felt tip — a broad marker swallows the small bands of pattern.

More Christmas pages

For the rest of the season see the Christmas coloring pages and the Christmas tree coloring pages, and there are twenty candy cane coloring pages, twenty gingerbread coloring pages, twenty elf coloring pages and twenty Santa coloring pages.